Overview of creating budgets

Sage Intacct offers multiple ways to create a budget.

If you’re new to creating budgets, we recommend that you start by reviewing the information in Before you create a budget. Want to see a sample of a completed budget? You can download a sample budget.

You can locate your budgets in Budgets > All > Budgets > Budgets repository.

Prerequisites

Before you can create or import a budget, several items in Sage Intacct must be set up:

• Reporting periods to be used for budgeting: Reporting periods must exist and must have the Use for budgeting checkbox selected. Reporting periods used for budgeting are typically monthly. Also, the reporting periods used for budgeting cannot overlap.

  For example, you cannot use all the following reporting periods for budgeting in a given year because they overlap:

  • January

  • February

  • March

  • First Quarter

  Learn more about reporting periods.

• Accounts: Each account that needs a budget must exist in the chart of accounts. Learn more about creating accounts.
• Dimensions: You can use dimensions such as Location, Department, and Employee in a budget, but dimensions are not required. Learn more about planning a budget with dimensions.

Creating budgets

There are several ways to create a budget. Each has its own pros and cons.

• Create a budget manually: You can create a budget and enter the data manually. This can be time consuming but enables you to see exactly how the budget is being populated as you’re doing it.
• Create a budget from an existing budget: You can create a budget by making changes to one that already exists. Creating a new budget based on one that already exists is a quick way to get your budget process started.
• Import a budget: You can import budget information by creating the budget information in a spreadsheet. Then you import the spreadsheet to create and populate the budget.